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By Root 5012 0

a triumphant and bright disinterestedness as if she had been the daughter of an old friend and drinking companion. It was Moses who was surly—who hardly looked at her, although he was polite enough. It made Mrs. Wapshot unhappy to see any impediment in the relationships of the young. They ate cold carp in the homely dining room, half lighted by the summer twilight, half by what seemed to be an inverted bowl of stained glass, pieced together mostly out of gloomy colors. “These napkins are more holy than righteous,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at the table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns. She was one of those women who seemed to have learned to speak by rote. “May I please be excused,” Moses mumbled as soon as he had cleared his plate, and he was out of the dining room and had one foot in the night before his mother spoke.

“Don’t you want any dessert, Moses?”

“No, thank you.”

“Where are you going?”

“Over to Pendletons’.”

“I want you home early. Honora is coming.”

“Yes.”

“I wish Honora would come,” Mrs. Wapshot said.

Honora will not come—she is hooking a rug—but they do not know and so rather than dwell with the Chekovian delays of this family watching the night come in we might climb the stairs and pry into things of more pertinence. There is Leander’s bureau drawer, where we find a withered rose—once yellow—and a wreath of yellow hair, the butt end of a Roman candle that was fired at the turn of the century, a boiled shirt on which an explicit picture of a naked woman is drawn in red ink, a necklace made of champagne corks and a loaded revolver. Or we might look at Coverly’s book shelf—War and Peace, The Complete Poetry of Robert Frost, Madame Bovary, La Tulipe Noire. Or still better we might go to the Pocamasset Trust Company in the village where Honora’s will lies in a safe deposit box.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Honora’s will was no secret. “Lorenzo left me a little something,” she had told the family, “and I have to consider his wishes as well as my own. Lorenzo was very devoted to the family and the older I grow the more important family seems to me. It seems to me that most of the people I trust and admire come from good New England stock.” There was more of the same; and then she said that since Moses and Coverly were the last of the Wapshots she would divide her fortune between them, contingent upon their having male heirs. “Oh, the money will do so much good,” Mrs. Wapshot had exclaimed, while institutes for the blind and the lame, homes for unwed mothers and orphan asylums danced in her head. The news of their inheritance did not elate the boys—it did not seem at first to penetrate or alter their feelings toward life, and Honora’s decision only seemed to Leander to be a matter of course. What else would she have done with the money? But, considering the naturalness of her choice, it came as a surprise to everyone that it should lead them into something as unnatural as anxiety.

On the winter after Honora had made her will Moses came down with a severe case of mumps. “Is he all right?” Honora kept asking. “Will he be all right?” Moses recovered but that summer a little gasoline stove in the galley of their sailboat exploded, burning Coverly in the groin. They were on tenterhooks again. However, these forthright assaults on the virility of his sons did not trouble Leander as much as those threats to the continuation of the family that lay beyond his understanding. Such a thing happened when Coverly was eleven or twelve and went with his mother to see a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was transported. When he got back to the farm he would be Oberon. Girdling himself with a loose arrangement of neckties, he tried flying from the back stairs into the parlor, where his father was adding up the monthly accounts. He couldn’t fly, of course, and landed in a pile on the floor—his neckties undone—and while Leander did not speak to him angrily he felt, standing above his naked son in the presence of something mysterious and unrestful—Icarus! Icarus!—as if the boy